This week’s announcement that the federal government will grant
Gilroy $1.1 million to hire three new cops was not enough to smooth
over current officers’ frustrations with city council.
This week’s announcement that the federal government will grant Gilroy $1.1 million to hire three new cops was not enough to smooth over current officers’ frustrations with city council.
The Gilroy Police Department was the only agency in Santa Clara County to receive the stimulus funds from the federal government to beef up its force. Chief Denise Turner originally asked for $2.8 million to hire seven officers, but she and her staff are now preparing a new scenario for the council to consider Sept. 14.
The council must sign off on the plan because the funding expires after three years and its terms require the city to retain the three officers for an additional year at the city’s expense. A first-year officer takes anywhere from four months to a year to train and costs Gilroy about $138,000 annually in salary and associated benefits when hired, according to city figures.
Despite news of the grant money, off-duty officers in Gilroy’s 56-member Police Officer Association – 33 of whom live outside the city and all of whom recently approved a no confidence vote in the mayor – have spent the last two weeks canvassing the downtown and First Street shopping areas. The officers asked business owners to hang up a mailer the union sent to residents earlier this month.
The flyer includes a collage of recent crime-related headlines from the Dispatch and a letter from President Mitch Madruga decrying staffing shortages and $1.1 million in personnel cuts his members and the council – with a 5-2 vote – agreed to in the beginning of July.
Meanwhile, the mayor has been compiling an invitation list for a “community roundtable” to discuss public safety and other issues. He dismissed speculation that he was creating the forum to diffuse a nascent recall campaign led by conservative activist Mark Zappa, who has singled out the mayor among the council as having a soft stance on public safety. The POA has yet to support or oppose the recall effort.
“Our recent efforts to communicate with the public isn’t the beginning of a secret plan to recall the mayor,” Madruga wrote in a letter to the Dispatch Thursday. He did not return subsequent messages asking when the union would take a stand on the recall or how much the union has spent on its campaign so far.
What’s more important for the POA, Madruga wrote, is informing the public about the department’s low staffing level, which equals about 1.13 cops per 1,000 residents versus the national average of 1.8, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The POA emphasized this point in the mailers, one of which hangs in the window of Stubby’s Sports Bar and Grill off First Street.
Owner John Stieber welcomed the flyer not as a stance against the mayor but as a concerned citizen who wants the entire council to know that “police should be an untouchable entity,” he said.
“They are the thin blue line that separates us from anarchy,” Stieber said, adding that patrons have paused to read the mailer more than any other flyer in his windows. The bottom portion of each mailer includes a perforated postcard for residents to tear out and check their willingness to support the force. Madruga said Thursday he had received a stack of about 2.5 inches of cards so far.
Of the $1.1 million in cuts the union agreed to, which equals about a tenth of the patrol division’s annual personnel costs, about 40 percent came from the resignations of two officers who quit during contract negotiations and the upcoming retirements of two additional officers, according to city figures. The federal grant will help offset these losses throughout the next three years, but Turner will still face re-deployment issues, police said.
Residents could have a chance to discuss this issue and others at the mayor’s first roundtable, Sept. 23 at the Senior Center near Sixth and Hanna streets. His colleagues on the dais are welcome to sit in the audience, but what Pinheiro really wants is not another policy body, but a broad cross-section of at least 20 community leaders and public employees – including Turner, Fire Chief Dale Foster and the Gilroy Unified School District – to sit down and talk about Gilroy’s economic development, public safety and any other issues, he said.
Renowned local chef Sam Bozzo has agreed to facilitate the conversation, and Pinheiro – a member of the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce – said he will also ask Community Media Access Partnership to film the discussions.
“There is a lot of going back and forth and talking in this community, and we need to get all the players at this table to get a pretty broad view. It will give us a good idea of the community pulse and the different issues, and it will be an opportunity to vent and tell us what’s going on,” Pinheiro said.
The idea for the discussions grew from his recent Coffee with the Mayor sessions. Since April, Pinheiro has held 10 of those cozy open-door meetings at City Hall with small groups of residents trickling in and out to chat about anything.
“This community is facing many things that are dividing it, but communities are like a family – you don’t want to split up family. You try to bring people together, and I believe that’s what I need to do,” Pinheiro said.
Zappa believes what he needs to do is recall the mayor for what he has described as Pinheiro’s lack of leadership in regard to public safety. Zappa aims to time the recall vote with the November election to save the city money. Without piggy-backing on another election – which would most likely cost Gilroy somewhere in the five-figure range – a stand-alone election would cost more than $400,000, according to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. As of Friday, the city clerk’s office, which must review any petition before Zappa starts gathering the 3,700 or so signatures necessary to force a vote, had not received any papers from Zappa.
If and when the recall campaign gathers steam, Pinheiro said he would not attempt to use the roundtable discussions as a rebuttal platform. Instead, he and Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage – who has announced plans to run for mayor in 2012 and also to help defend Pinheiro against any recall – will mount a separate campaign.
